


Safe as Nests

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Secret Six
Genre: Ableism, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Making Your Own Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 08:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15166709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Strix has had families before. Or at least, she has had people who claimed to be her family, even if most of the time it was a lie. But they were never like these people.





	Safe as Nests

**Author's Note:**

> I cried while writing this because I love Strix so much.

Strix has never had a family like this before. Before the Court, she had a family, but it wasn’t like this. It was quiet and calm. The Court had been even quieter, the kind of silence that sinks into your bones and makes you something else. The Birds had been louder, but they hadn’t been _her_ family. They had been loud with each other and quiet with her in the ways that mattered. That bad ways. But her family now is not quiet. Not at all.

Mr. Blake, Strix has noticed, rumbles when he is around Mr. Deadshot. He does it sometimes around Mr. Dibny, too, but mostly it is only for Mr. Deadshot. He puffs his chest and rumbles and Strix thinks it is very funny. The first time she laughed at him they were all worried because they had never heard her laughing before but then they were okay, and Mr. Blake went back to puffing and rumbling.

Ms. Sue says that this is because Mr. Blake is in _l-o-v-e_ love, like Ms. Scandal and Ms. Kay and Ms. Liana are in love and like Ms. Sue and Mr. Dibny are in love. Strix used to be scared of that sometimes because the last time she saw people in _l-o-v-e_ love where they both loved each other, it was her parents the day that the bomb hit. But it wasn’t the love that hurt her or her family. It was the Bad Bomb.

Strix is fairly sure that love and bombs go together more often than Ms. Sue says that they do, because she remembers when they went to fight the Riddler-Mockingbird, and she remembers that they had to fight Mr. Dibny so that he wouldn’t get a bomb kill him because of love. And then things with Lori had gone bad and then she had won the game with the ball.

Strix likes Lori. Lori is an ink-person who talks like she has a mouth full of shadows and moves like she’s afraid someone is going to start hitting her. Ms. Sue moves like that sometimes, too, but she doesn’t talk like shadows, she talks like stones. Lori likes to dance at night. She’s not scared of being hit at night. Strix likes that. She likes dancing at night, too, now that Lori has shown her how. She loves Lori. Lori octopus-ink, Lori night dancer, Lori magic, Lori storms.

Lori says that Strix is her sister. Kani says that too. But they say it differently. Lori says it like she’s angry, like she’s the only one allowed to have Strix for a sister. Kani says it like a blanket, like comfort, like he’s reminding her that she has her own people now to take care of her. People who won’t make her kill people. Strix doesn’t want to kill people anymore. After Shiva made her kill those people who called themselves the things _her_ people did. It was wrong. It was bad.

Kani says that it’s okay to not want to kill people. That _he_ doesn’t like killing people. Hates it. He always wanted to be a high profile villain, maybe with a nemesis, not a murderer. Kani says that he wanted to be like Catwoman. And then they talked about Catwoman for awhile, because Strix remembers when Catwoman took her away from the bad place and let her bring her crayons and brought her to the flowers and to Batgirl.

Strix doesn’t know if she liked Batgirl. She liked her yellow boots. And she liked it when they jumped down from the sky like they were flying. But Batgirl and the other people liked to say that she wasn’t good enough at talking to them. They thought that she was stupid even if they didn’t say it out loud. She could _tell._ That’s why she wanted Mother Eve to fix her voice. And then she got taken by Riddler-Mockingbird and she met people who didn’t care if she could use her mouth to talk because they would listen anyway.

But she knows that she liked Catwoman. Catwoman got her away from the bad place with the people who took away her food and would yell at her to come down from her perch and would hit her with the sticks. It wasn’t as bad as it was when she was still being trained to be a Talon. It was nice, compared to that. But not as nice as here.

Here, nobody makes her fight her friends to the death for food to see who is the strongest. Here, nobody makes her hunt down and murder people with bombs like the ones that destroyed her old life. Here, they do not hit her or burn her or do other bad things to her. Strix was worried that they would, at first. Worried because they were supposed to be Bad People, like her, and bad people are supposed to hurt you.

Mr. Dibny and Mr. Blake were very sad when she told them that. They said that they were her family now. Like before the bomb. So they weren’t going to hurt her. Strix liked that. She still likes it. Sometimes, before the bomb, her family would yell at her, but it was always because they were worried, or frustrated, not because they wanted to hurt her. Mr. Dibny said that family doesn’t hurt you, and then he had touched Mr. Blake’s hand like he did sometimes with Ms. Sue when she forgot where she was.

Strix thinks Mr. Dibny is funny. Mostly just because everyone else seems to think so. He said that they were going to try “going straight”, or at least Kani, Lori, and Strix were going to have to try, and that made Kani laugh a lot and even though Strix didn’t understand the joke, she laughed too, because when Kani laughs it makes her feel warm.

Mr. Dibny makes her feel warm, too, but not like Kani does. Kani feels like a thunderstorm. Like cracking ice. Mr. Dibny feels like sunshine. Like the picnic before the bomb came. He says that he always wanted a daughter. Strix doesn’t know why that makes him sad, even though he says that he’s happy because now he has two daughters and a sometimes daughter, sometimes son, sometimes child. And he has a Thomas. And their extended family is big. Strix thinks that’s pretty good. As far as families go.

Ms. Scandal and her wives don’t come over to visit very often. Usually Mr. Blake goes over to visit _them._ He says it’s because he was the donor for Ms. Liana’s baby. Strix doesn’t know what that means, but she thinks it’s nice that there is going to be a baby soon. She doesn’t know if she likes babies, but she knows that she likes Ms. Liana and Mr. Blake, so the baby will be good.

Ms. Nette says that the baby will be a kitten when she wants to tease Mr. Blake about it. Strix is not quite sure what that means, but it must be good, because kittens are good. Mr. Blake showed her a kitten once. She liked it a lot. If the baby is like the kitten, it’ll be good. Ms. Nette is kind of scary because her eyes are sometimes weird, and it reminds Strix of the court, and she doesn’t like it. But when her eyes aren’t black, Ms. Nette is nice. She likes Kani but she also likes Mr. Deadshot the same way Mr. Blake likes him.

Strix likes to watch that, because it is always funny. Ms. Nette talks to Mr. Deadshot and does things with him and then Mr. Blake comes over and starts rumbling again and one time Strix saw all three of them _and_ Kani having sex on the couch. She didn’t like that because she wanted to sit on the couch, but she was glad that they were happy.

Strix believes that _that’s_ what a family _should_ do. They should make each other happy. Her family makes her happy. That is what makes it good. That is what makes it safe. Her family showed her that they would die for her. She knows she would do the same for them. In a heartbeat.

Yes. That’s what family does. That is what a family  _is._

They are safe.


End file.
